http://music.hyperreal.org/epsilon/info/devito.html
FACING
THE MUZAK
Muzak is one of the most insidious parts of our
modern-day culture. The quintessential Heavy Metal guitarist Ted Nugent
(without much doubt the antithesis of the sedate style of Muzak composition)
once made a bid in 1989 of ten million dollars to buy the company simply so he
could erase the tapes. The company responded by making a very light version of
one of Nugent's biggest hits, "Cat Scratch Fever," just to infuriate
him. Why is it that musicians as well as music listeners often dislike Muzak so
vehemently? While many people may think that Muzak is a harmless way of helping
people to pass time and avoid silence as well as boredom, This
form of music is also a powerful tool for manipulating human emotions and behavior. In 1979 alone, according to the essay
"Facing the Muzak"by Bruce MacLeod, more
than 100 million people were exposed to Muzak daily in over 25 countries
throughout the world. Also, only seven out of 150 of
the largest corporations in
Almost all of the music that originates from the
Muzak corporation is recorded especially by the
company for use in working environments. This music is
usually recorded with some of the best studio musicians in
"I like it (ambient
music) as an ambiguous term. It gives me a certain
latitude. It has two major meanings. One is the idea of music that allows you
any listening position in relation to it. This has been widely misinterpreted
by the press (in their infinite unsubtlety) as background music. I mean music
that can be backg- round or foreground or anywhere,
which is a rather different idea. Most music chooses its own position in terms
of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up
front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you
could slip in and out of. Ambient music allows many
different types of attention."
Also, ambient music is not recorded by studio musicians
in a derivative, banal manner like most Muzak. Ambient music is usually
recorded and composed by the composers with a completely different intent both
compositionally and in receptional intent than Muzak,
and furthermore, ambient music doesn't have to conform
to the rigid musical rules and structures that the Muzak corporation forces
upon their recording staff and musicians. Muzak is recorded
in a very formulaic and unoriginal fashion, where ambient composers have a much
greater range of choice available.
A main selling point for background Muzak in the
retail world is the use of this music as a sales tool. 3M markets its
background music by asserting "Music helps make people happy and more
contented, while it helps you make more money." MacLeod makes the cogent
point in his essay that any music not consciously listened to becomes
background music. This raises one of the most interesting points yet to be considered about the distracted, or background use of
music. If we as listeners use music as a background to other activities, surely
this reveals deeper assumptions about the place of music and its value in our
lives. "It does not seem to be the programmed music which is at the heart
of the matter. It is, rather, our society's values, which allow that music of
any kind need only be heard, not listened to. " Even the Muzak Corporation understands this fear of
silence that we seem to have as human beings, as it is revealed by their old
slogan "Music fills the deadly silences." MacLeod even goes as far to
compare this fear of silence with our twentieth century drug-oriented culture.
Background music is seen as a mask for undesirable
stimuli by providing one continuous, reliable stimulus to our environment. Many
people use the television in much the same way, by turning shows on while
simultaneously not paying conscious, focused attention to the show. The mere
sound of the television calms many people during times when their domestic
space is silent. It does seem that we have a need to "mask reality"
in many ways, and this honestly does not seem that far away from the alcoholic
who must mask reality in his or her own way, or the heroin addict who must do
the same. It is society's own passivity which is found
at the end of this chain of reasoning. Ambient music may indeed fall prey to
this fault that MacLeod has indicated with the use of Muzak, or indeed any
music used as background music. It is true that many music listeners use music
as aural wallpaper, sound that keeps the silence in the environment from
becoming too predominant. However, the intent of ambient music composers, such
as Eno, is quite different than
that of the Muzak Corporation. And, as Eno has stated earlier, he wanted his compositions to allow
listeners to find their own methods for listening, their own modes of reception
for his ambient music. Muzak, in contrast, basically
imposes itself upon the listener in the way that it has been manufactured to
do.
Eno intends his listener to approach listening to his
compositions as he or she would to common popular music. Instead, the listener
is invited not to focus closely upon the music, but to play it at soft volume
levels so that it gives the room or art installation a subtle feel that the
space wouldn't otherwise have. To quote Eno again from his liner notes from Music for Airports:
"Ambient music is
intended to induce calm and a space to think. It must be able to accommodate
many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must
be as ignorable as it is listenable. Whereas the extant canned music companies
proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their
acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, ambient
music is intended to enhance these. Whereas
conventional background music is produ- ced by stripping away all sense of
doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, ambient
music retains these qualities".
There are several main compositional and perceptual
differences between Muzak and the ambient music style. The compositional
intent, the recording style, and the intended effect are three important
distinctions to be made between the two. Perhaps one
of the most important distinctions to be investigated about the ambient music
style would be the difference between focused and distracted listening, and
this subject was brought up many years ago by a philosopher associated with the
Frankfurt School of philosophy--Theodor W. Adorno. It is a testament to Adorno's
scholarship and insight that his essay, "On The
Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," written in
1938, raises issues that are still quite relevant to music production and
reception in 1996. Ambient music violates many of Adorno's
precepts, but the style of ambient composition does have its own concepts and
reasons to exist as a viable, respected art form, despite Adorno's
criticisms.
There are several main points made
by Adorno that concern this essay on the ambient
style; one of the most important would be that we, as individuals and music
listeners in our capitalist, commodity-driven economic system, are discouraged
from listening to music in a structural fashion, and furthermore that we have
lost the freedom of real choice when it comes to what we listen to. While some music scholars might attack this essay
due to Adorno's Marxist orientation, the essay on its
own stands apart from a merely Marxist critique, and any critical orientation
such as that is likely to completely overlook the
points that Adorno wishes to make. The essay is
powerful both in its remarkable delineation of the growth of the culture
industry, as well as the decline in aesthetic response of the individual within
a capitalistic society.
An important concept raised by Adorno
in this essay is the trend he terms "the regression of listening." He
claims that we as listeners and consumers have lost our freedom of choice and
responsibility, as well as the capacity for conscious perception of music. Adorno states:
"The delight in the
moment and the gay facade becomes an excuse for absolving the listener from the
thought of the whole (piece of music), whose claim is compromised in proper
listening. The listener is converted, along his line of least resistance, into
the acquiescent purchaser."
Adorno also claims that
"Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with
stubborn malice they demand the one dish they have once been served." Adorno goes even further and asserts that we have become
"forcibly retarded". This retardation is connected
to the machinery of the music business, distribution and advertising in Adorno's essay, and he states "Regressive listening is
tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly by
advertising." In this way all music is passed
through a narrow channel, and a great deal of it ends up as nothing more than a
corporate trademark. The reliance upon the "hook" in a song is tied directly to advertising; (imagine if Adorno could see what is happening now with endorsements,
and songwriters writing songs directly for commercials, or an even worse case,
where older songs are appropriated and used for advertising. Many children know
little about "classical" music except what they have
been exposed to through the Saturday morning cartoons). This regression
of listening is a serious issue, and Adorno was critiquing both composition as well as reception with this
concept. He saw distracted listening as being largely a passive activity, and
that passivity could have, in his view, led to even greater passivity in the
masses, and to a possible fascist society as a whole. And,
as a Jew who survived World War II, Adorno was no
stranger to the dangers of wide-scale passivity of the masses, and vehemently attempted
to avoid the recreation of this state by his works on the sociology of music.
Passive acceptance of art would lead to the passive acceptance of politics as
well in Adorno's view, and this was to be avoided at all costs. Music for Adorno
should foster active, structural listening practice with a critical ear.
Adorno raises another important concept within his essay
which is relevant to ambient music composition and reception, and that is what
he termed "deconcentration". Adorno asserts that deconcentration
is "the perceptual activity which prepares the way for the forgetting and
sudden recognition of mass music." His point is that we, as passive music
receivers, are no longer able to listen in a concentrated manner, partly due to
the limited structural range of most all popular
music. Distracted listening is seen by Adorno
as "retarded listening" because the listener takes in so much less
information than with classical music, such as with a Beethoven symphony. He
relates this: "They (the listeners) cannot stand the strain of
concentrated listening and surrender themselves resignedly to what befalls
them, with which they can come to terms only if they do not listen to it too
closely." Careful active listening of popular music leads to almost instant
boredom in Adorno's view for the average music
listener, since there is little, if any, structural sophistication within the
popular music that Adorno was familiar with. This decline in concentrated listening is a big issue
for Adorno, and directly relates to his concept of
the "regression of listening", and it will also
be important to an understanding of how the style of ambient music negates some
of these concepts later within this essay.
Also within his essay, Adorno
asserts that much of popular music and art has fallen prey to fetishism, which
he first defines in the context of repetition. This fetishism is a result of
several factors: many years of the "star" system, the manipulation of
taste by the media, and the commercial distribution networks used by almost all
of the major music recording companies. The most popular works become those
that are most repeated over and over again. It is a
cumulative process that becomes, in Adorno's
words, "a fatal circle." Ownership of song rights is
also challenged by Adorno, in which he
characterizes the use of modern copyright law as "the composer's idea,
which one thinks he can put in his pocket and take it home."
"Great" music in Adorno's perspective would
be compositions that require close, attentive, active listening by the
receiver, such as works by Schoenberg or Beethoven. However, this places Adorno in an insulated, very elitist position. These types
of music that Adorno heartily endorses as "great"
require a high degree of education, as well as an active understanding of what
is going on with the composers' technique to be fully appreciated
and understood by the receiver. Music, in Adorno's
conception, needs to be part of an "active" listening experience, and
he felt that popular music was regressive at best, and was just easy listening,
allowing itself to be understood easily with little attention, and that popular
music contained very little structural interest that would sustain the interest
of an active listener.